Midweek Mouth-Off: why do bad movies own the box office?

Sometimes you get movies that reign supreme at the box office and deserve the top spot. Sometimes, you get movies that only find a cult following after the DVD release. Sometimes you get epic flops. But sometimes, you get movies that really shouldn’t do well, no one wants them to do well, yet inexplicably they do.

Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles falls into the last category. By all accounts it’s a terrible movie. Lacking the charm and appeal of the source material, it’s apparently a typical Baysplosion production, just with turtles instead of transforming cars. So why is it raking in so much money? Critics slated it, audience reception has been lukewarm at best, yet enough people have seen it so they’ve already green-lit a sequel.

I know that Michael Bay’s name carries some weight, you just have to look at the Transformer’s franchise for that, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise is a big nostalgia draw card, but what is truly making people go watch it? Is it peer pressure of “you have to see this because you watched the cartoons as a child” or is it a case of “I have to judge a movie for myself, even if everyone I know says it’s bad”? Maybe it’s even “I just hope it’s so bad it’s good”. Whatever the reason, the numbers add up to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles holding the number one spot on the North American Box Office for two weeks now.

So this week, what I would like to know is: what makes you go watch bad movies? You know it’s going to be bad, every critic has told you that it’s bad, maybe even your friends that saw it before you told you not to waste your time. What’s your excuse?

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